Public design commissioning is not a matter of preference — there is a right way and everything else. We've worked through enough flawed briefs, misaligned procurement structures, and well-meaning but broken processes to know exactly where the public commissioning of design goes wrong, and what it looks like when it doesn't.

Designers work for free more often than the industry admits — and we've done it ourselves, deliberately, with criteria. The question isn't whether it devalues your work. The question is whether you set the terms or someone else did. We've spent two decades deciding which projects earn our time without a brief, a budget, or a contract.

Passion in design gets misquoted constantly — treated as fuel when it's closer to weather. We've spent twenty years watching it ignite projects and abandon them halfway through. What keeps work honest isn't feeling, it's the decision to continue when passion has already left the room. That gap between passion in design and actual commitment is where studios either build something or quietly repeat themselves.

Self-doubt in the design process is not the problem — ignoring it is. We've watched it surface in almost every serious project we've taken on over two decades, and we've stopped trying to push past it. Designer self-doubt, when you learn to sit with it, is usually the clearest signal that the work is getting close to something real.

Žakelj priimek ni le podpis — je surovina. Ko nosi ime tisti, ki oblikuje, se vprašanje avtorstva zaplete na zanimiv način. Ta projekt smo naredili, ker smo morali: ker je priimek Žakelj dovolj bogat, da postane samostojna oblikovalska izjava.

Brand positive impact is the question we ask before anything else — before colour, before form, before the first mark on paper. Not what the brand sells, but what shift it causes in the people who encounter it. That single answer, when we find it, becomes the gravitational centre everything else orbits.

Definition of a brand is where most projects quietly fail — not in execution, but in understanding. A brand is not a logo, not a palette, not a tagline. It is the gap between what a company says it is and what people actually believe. We've spent twenty years closing that gap, and the distance is rarely where clients expect it to be.

Designer learning process isn't a phase — it's the foundation everything else is built on. We spent years in Ljubljana studios understanding materials, systems, and failure before a single award or client brief justified the time. The designer learning process, done honestly, is what separates work that holds from work that merely sells.